Ectoras points us to these worthless, practically incoherent ramblings in WaPo.
"It's the biggest problem he's got," said Schwartz, from Germantown. "People don't want somebody who makes them feel stupid."
Imagine the Iowa hog farmer cracking open "Assault on Reason," and meeting Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Paine, John Kenneth Galbraith, Walter Lippmann, Johannes Gutenberg, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Jefferson and Marshall McLuhan -- all before finishing the introduction.
First of all, God forbid an Iowa hog farmer would about Lincoln. Secondly, as I pointed out earlier, why does Milbank think he's smarter than a hog farmer? For that matter, what makes him think he's smarter than a hog?
I'm not really intending this to be a Milbank thrashing (deserved as it may be), rather I want to point out the problem with Milbank wondering what the pig farmer must think. The problem is big, and the problem is pervasive. It's the problem we're all familiar with. It's a corporate media that feeds on advertising sales.
Instead of engaging in the impossible task of defining what is too smart, Milbank relies on what he imagines is how a poor, dumb hog farmer might react to all these fancy-schmancy dead folk names. Of course, he's engaging in a stereotype of a person he probably knows nothing about. Has he ever visited an Iowa hog farm? I doubt it. Neither have I, for that matter.
What makes Milbank think these are dumb people? What makes him think they would feel bad about having a smart President? Maybe they, like me, want a President who is smarter than us (me). Maybe such a President would be nice for a change.
More condescension from Dana:
"The new technology called 'Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging,' or FMRI, has revolutionized the ability of neuroscientists to look inside the operations of a living human brain and observe which regions of the brain are being used at which times and in response to which stimuli," Gore writes.
Still with him? Try this: "The architectural breakthrough associated with massive parallelism was to break up the power of the CPU and distribute it throughout the memory field to lots of smaller separate 'microprocessors' -- each one co-located with the portion of the memory field it was responsible for processing."
Woo, I barely could keep up with all that new tecknowladgy!
Really Dana, you're conducting your own private war on reason now, aren't you? None of your examples are that difficult to grasp. Or are they just hard for you to grasp?
Maybe Mr. Milbank is projecting his ignorance on the hog farmer, I don't know. He could even be projecting his distaste for being made to feel stupid. It doesn't matter.
What matters is that Milbank is worried too much about what the hog farmer thinks and not enough about getting real answers to real issues, and I think I know why.
Consultants.
I think the media's problem is the same as the problem in politics. Dumb ass consultants who market bullshit to the public every day. The same consultants that MSNBC listened to when they fired Donahue. Remember that? Consultants told MSNBC to not appear unpatriotic. MSNBC promptly fired the war critic Donahue. Nice.
Milbank worries too much about what the average American thinks because he's embedded in a corporate culture that markets to the average American. Instead of being opinion leaders, they're opinion followers. They have to be to make the kind of bucks they want. If circulation is up, ad revenue is up. Therefore, you have to have more and more bullshit like Milbank's article, because that's what consultants tell you the public wants.
Journalism should give the public what it needs. Let the advertisers (like me) worry about what the public wants.